Saelstrom Says Goodbye to IE6

Support for Internet Explorer 6 Dropped

We’ve been discussing this for awhile now, and have finally decided to pull the trigger on dropping support for internet explorer 6 (IE6). IE6 is a nine year old browser that can make web development a real pain.

It’s important to us that every website we create looks as good as possible on every platform that a website visitor may potentially view it on. However, we are drawing the line on this decade old browser and here are some reasons why:

It's good for us

As a leading Canadian web design and internet marketing company, the evolution of the web is very important to us at Saelstrom Marketing. We are at the point where we feel it is necessary to take a stand and stop supporting IE6 in order to truly support the growth of the web.

Developing websites to be compatible with IE6 greatly increases the time it takes to build a website. By dropping support for IE6 we can spend more time creating great websites and less time sorting out IE6 related bugs and issues.

It's great for our clients

Decreased cost - dropping compatibility for IE6 means the time it takes to build a website will be much faster. Less development time means less cost for our clients. This also decreases the time it takes to get our client’s beautiful new website up and running for the entire world to see.

It's even better for website visitors

More secure - IE6 is an unstable, insecure browser than does not support current web standards.

Faster - It's no secret, IE6 is slow. By upgrading to a new web browser visitors will be able to surf the web much faster.

If any of our clients require compatibility with IE6 we have no problem including support for the nine year old browser. However, we don’t feel it’s the optimal choice to spend all those extra (billable) hours on every website we create if support for IE6 is not required.

If a visitor goes to a website designed by Saelstrom, they will get a friendly pop up page that informs them that they are using an outdated browser. The pop up page will also present them with simple instructions on how to upgrade their browser, and improve their online experience!

We're not alone on this

Saelstrom Marketing isn’t the first major company to drop compatibility support for IE6. Other companies you may know who do not support IE6 include: Google, YouTube, Salesforce, and Facebook.

These days there’s only about 5% of the online population who still use IE6, many of which are government departments who upgrade their systems about once a decade.

Our Stats

We launched the new Saelstrom Marketing website April 1 2010. Beforehand we discussed whether we should build the new website to be compatible with IE6 or not. We decided to take a look at our website analytics for the previous 6 months for any insights.

Over a 6 month period 24.57% of site visitors to www.saelstrom.com viewed the website in Internet Explorer. Out of that 24.57%, only 5% (1.23% of total site visitors) were using IE6.

We also found the following site metrics for IE6 users to be quite interesting:

• IE6 visitors Avg. time on site was 89.09% less than the site average.
• IE6 visitors bounce rate was 73.22% greater than the site average.
• IE6 users pages/visit was 62.06% less than the site average.

Normally we see these types of metrics for low quality traffic sources ... but in this case I think it’s safe to say that IE6 users are just not enjoying the internet to its full potential. This made our decision easy, and we now encourage website visitors to do the right thing and upgrade their browsers rather than supporting a buggy, insecure, and unstable browser any longer.